Performance and making material histories of racialising violence in medicine

This article argues that gynaecology has historically understood Black women’s reproductive organs as a site of resource extraction, not healing and that contemporary performance offers a way to make the power relations entailed in this abstract visible. The histories of the transatlantic slave trade and gynaecology are intertwined and inform how the medical system interacts with Black women today. ‘Father of gynaecology’ and 19th-century American physician J. Marion Sims (1813–1883) was dependent on slavery in order to conduct experiments on enslaved Black women’s reproductive organs—notably for developing a cure for vesicovaginal fistula that later benefitted wealthy white women. Turning to three recent performances, Black Youth Project 100’s (BYP100) performance protests, Charly Evon Simpson’s Behind the Sheet and Mojisola Adebayo’s Family Tree , I analyse how performance can reveal medicine’s history of using the bodies of Black women as the raw material to develop medical innovations that prolong white life. BYP100’s performance protests at the statue of Sims in New York City made visible the racial violence he enacted on enslaved Black women’s bodies. The play Behind the Sheet gives voice to the enslaved Black women omitted from the archive. The play Family Tree draws connections between Sims and instances of medical racism in the 20th and 21st centuries, including Henrietta Lacks (1920–1951), whose cervical cells were taken for medical research without her consent, and Black nurses who died during the COVID-19 pandemic working for the UK’s National Health Service. Through performance, these three works draw attention to how the drive to read medical innovations as strictly positive ‘advancements’ often requires the erasure of coloniality’s racialising function within the production of knowledge.